Changing www.this.com into an actual link

[weirdbeardmt]

Hi, this is probably a common question, but all my attempts thus far have failed, and the documentation might as well be in Arabic for what it means to me.

Anyway, when I pull a news item out of my database, if it finds a URL then I want it to turn it into an actual link.

For example:

www.mysite.com becomes <a href="http://www.mysite.com" TARGET="_blank">www.mysite.com</A>

I have been playing around with str_replace and preg_replace but just can;t get this to work.

Any advice? Using a system similar to SPF's (i.e. wrapping links in URL tags or something is doable...

Thanks

[Chris82]

If you use the [link ] tags than this should work:

$link = "Hello my site is [link ] http://mysite.com[/link ]";

$link = preg_replace("/\[link\](.+?)\[\/link\]/", "<a href='$1' target='_blank'>$1</a>", $link);

If you don't want to use [link ] maybe this works (I think there was a similar post for this)

$link = preg_replace("/(https?:\/\/)(www)?|(ftp:\/\/)(ftp)?)(.+?)/", "<a href='$1$2$3' target='_blank'>$3</a>", $link);

If you want to use a [link ] type then maybe it is possible to add a description.

$link = '[link="http://www.domain.com"]description[/link]';

$link = preg_replace("/\[link=\"(.+?)\"\](.+?)\[\/link\]", "<a href='$1' target='_blank'>$2</a>", $link);

I am not sure if the second one works. However the first and second ones should.

[weirdbeardmt]

Thanks, but using the second one, I get this error:

Warning: Compilation failed: unmatched parentheses at offset 36 in C:\apache\htdocs\weirdbeard\blog.php on line 39

[weirdbeardmt]

Nevermind... http://sitepointforums.com/showthrea...threadid=58467

[Coomer]

The only thing wrong with that last code that was posted on that other thread is that if you have http:// or https:// or ftp:// in front of the www.somesite.com part, it won't be included as part of the link. It'll look something like http://www.nissanz.net. I tried to rewrite that code so that it would include the http:// part in the link, but I couldn't get it to work, because then there would be two http:// parts in some urls. Just letting you know so that you don't run into errors.

[weirdbeardmt]

Yeh, I realise that. It's no biggy really though

[weirdbeardmt]

OK I have actually come up with another problem to that code... it doesn't like query strings. It is doing crazy things to any URL that looks like this:

http://www.somesiteoranother.com/thi...hp?oops=darnit

Any way to fix it?

[redgoals]

<?
$text = "http://somesiteoranother.com/thispage.php?oops=darnit, www.somesiteoranother.com/thispage.php?oops=darnit";
$text = ereg_replace("[www]+.[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]","<a href=\"\\0\">\\0</a>", $text);
$text = ereg_replace("[[:alpha:]]+://[^<>[:space:]]+[[:alnum:]/]","<a href=\"\\0\">\\0</a>", $text);
echo "$text";
?>

[DR_LaRRY_PEpPeR]

ereg? NO! :-D

here's my function again that i posted here. works great, is super fast with the preg functions, and does e-mail addresses, too. if you don't want e-mail addresses done, remove the the first line of the make_clickable() function. usage: `$txt = make_clickable($txt);' :-)

function make_clickable($txt)
{
	$txt = preg_replace('#([^\w=+;%?/]|^)(\w+[\w.-]*\w+@\w+[\w.-]*\w+\.[a-z]{2,4})#i', '$1<a href="mailto:$2">$2</a>', $txt);

	$txt = preg_replace('#([^\w/@]|^)((?:www\.[\w-]+\.[\w-]+?\S*?)|(?:[a-z]{3,6}://\S+?))(?=[^a-z0-9/]*?(?:[\s<\][]|(?:&(?:quot|lt|gt);)|$))#ei', 'create_link("$1", "$2")', $txt);

	return $txt;
}

function create_link($pre, $url)
{
	// these 2 lines fix any apostrophes that get
	// messed up by being passed to the function
	$pre = str_replace("\\'", "'", $pre);
	$url = str_replace("\\'", "'", $url);
	$suf = '';

	if (preg_match('/&amp;amp$/', $url))
	{
		$suf = '&amp;amp';
		$url = substr($url, 0, -4);
	}

	$html_url = $url;

	if (!preg_match('#^[a-z]{3,6}://#i', $html_url)) { $html_url = "http://$url"; }

	return "$pre<a href=\"$html_url\" target=\"_blank\">$url</a>$suf";
}

[weirdbeardmt]

Works like a charm. Thanks. You wanna explain it?

[DR_LaRRY_PEpPeR]

Originally posted by weirdbeardmt
You wanna explain it?

err... no. if you understand regex syntax, you can take the pattern a couple characters at a time and probably be able to figure out what it's looking for. maybe that's what i do when i'm trying to decipher someone else's regular expression.

[weirdbeardmt]

Originally posted by DR_LaRRY_PEpPeR

if you understand regex syntax

er, well that's my first problem...

[DR_LaRRY_PEpPeR]

the best reference/"tutorial" i can recommend is the PCRE pattern syntax in the PHP manual. it's long, but if you try to study and understand each piece before you move on, i think you can understand a lot better! you can do it.